This is an
investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view
to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.

Many
years ago, I used to read a lot of SF and then I got bored with it and
stopped. When I started browsing for it again on the shelves of new and
second-hand bookshops (ah! remember when it was so easy to do that?
real bookstores with real books!), there were a few names that were new
to me, one being China Miéville. Strange name. I thought he was a woman
at first. It turns out he is the offspring of Sixties hippies who
thought “China” was cool. He also appears to be an ex-public-school
Trotskyist (but I won’t hold that against him) (note to US readers:
“public” here of course means “private”) who has actually stood for the
UK Parliament, for the Socialist Alliance. And he has a PhD in
international law.

Miéville, by his own account (see the opening
exchanges of this interview), is
an unashamed genre writer. Successful genre writers for a generation
have been recognisable for their paperbacks being marketed in uniform
designs with embossed metallic lettering. There was a period when
Martin Amis was being given this treatment, which only goes to show
that publishing promoters are sometimes clever enough to understand
there are cool kudos to be had (and therefore profit to be made) from
pretending not to be “literary”. Though it probably wouldn’t work for
Henry James.

Some writers try to straddle the marketing divide in
what I believe to be unsatisfactory ways. Iain Banks flips over into SF
by the expedient of inserting a middle initial M into his name.
Miéville, however, in a later passage in the interview I’ve referenced
above, takes a more integrated view of his aesthetics (and in this is
probably closer to, say, Doris Lessing, who clearly doesn’t care which
niche she’s marketed into), averring that it would be “the Holy Grail”
to “write the ripping yarn that is also sociologically serious and
stylistically avant-garde”.

Does he pull this off in Perdido
Street Station (2000)? Not quite, but this is a book of considerable
originality whose mise-en-scène is disturbingly unforgettable.

There
are a few reference markers. Miéville’s acknowledgements include thanks
to the memory of Mervyn Peake. Followers of English fantasy typically
divide into enthusiasts for Tolkien and for Peake. I guess the latter
is seen as grittier, more avant-garde, more political, less nostalgic.
Miéville’s invention of the city of New Crobuzon (and the world of
Bas-Lag in which it is set) has obvious affinities with Peake’s
Gormenghast. It is a dark, urban, Gothic, grotesque world; the place
names, for instance, are recognisably English inventions, but baroque
and grimly comic: Murkside, Griss Fell, Bonetown, Skulkford, Petty
Coil, Kinken, and the rivers that trisect the city, the Tar and the
Canker.

Having said that, I must point out there are some
Tolkien-like features. Like The Lord of the Rings, the book begins with
a map. Yes, you can follow the action through all the sites mentioned
above and more via the impressively complex plan of New Crobuzon. I’m a
sucker for that. Also, the monsters in the book – that is, the most
terrifying of several different kinds of monster – the Slake Moths – are
dark presences in the sky with the uncanny fascination of Tolkien’s
Nazgul or Dark Riders. And, while, the book lacks any cosy remembered
homeland like the Shire, it is populated, like The Lord of the Rings,
by humans as well as humanoid hybrids and even stranger beings who
unite in a campaign to defeat overwhelming evil. It is true that “good”
doesn’t triumph in any facile way, but then that’s sort of true for
Tolkien’s trilogy as well.

Those hybrids: there are cactacae
(cactus-like humanoids, originally from a desert environment), vodyanoi
(humanoids with amphibian characteristics), garudas (bird-like
humanoids with the power of flight – the narrative is sparked by the
plight of one of these, who has been deprived of his wings for an
unspecified crime), and a myriad of sub-human but sentient creatures.
The protagonist, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, whose scientific
investigations at the behest of the stricken garuda trigger a chain of
disastrous events, has a girlfriend called Lin who’s a Khepri: a being
with a woman’s body and an insect’s carapace for a head (what my more
politically incorrect student chums decades ago would have regarded as
the utimate paper-bag job).

Whether this menagerie in the end
better recalls Max Ernst or Star Trek, there is a contemporary, even
political edge to all this which Miéville exploits cleverly. The most
obvious fact here is that it’s the city itself that is the most
palpable and powerful presence in the novel. You can almost smell it.
The second most obvious fact is that this is a grotesque depiction of
London. The map clearly has the shape and feel of London, with the
river running through it roughly west to east, a Parliament building
stuck right on that river, right in the middle, and a criss-cross of
railway lines. Yes, this is an SF novel with railways, another fact
that delights me. It recognisably intercuts with that sub-genre of SF
known as steampunk, deploying
as it does Victorian steam engines, mechanical/analogue computers that
become sentient, and alternative science (techniques that appear
magical allow the powers that be to punish transgressors by modifying
their physiologies in radical and grotesque ways – yet powered, heavier
than air flight seems to be unknown). Mervyn Peake was a pioneer here
too.

The humans – recognisably white, middle-class folk – run
this impossibly diverse, multicultural city, exploiting the other
species (“xenians”), who tend to live in ghetto-like districts, often
specialising in doing the dirty jobs. Lin, like many of her khepri kin,
works as an artist, using the exudations of her own body as materials –
I get the strong impression that her spiritual home is Hackney. In one
memorable episode, the amphibian vodyanoi, who of course work as
dockers, stage a strike which is brutally put down by the government.
There are numerous tour-de-force set-pieces like this, but the problem
is that they are poorly integrated into the narrative.

This is
the main criticism of this otherwise impressive piece of writing. The
rendering of this infernal world in all its detail, with its complex
power-structures, is, one suspects, the author’s chief delight, and he
luxuriates in his own prose, which is, I have to say, over-reliant on
my least favourite literary trope, the simile: in the space of little
more than a page, for example, we have “thin windows like arrow-slits”,
“the militia’s hub, the Spike, that punctured the earth like a concrete
thorn in the heart of the city”, a dirigible that “flapped and lolled
and swelled like a dying fish”, “slate roofs hunching like shoulders in
the cold, rotten walls”.

And beyond this inferno, he hints at
even worse places: when the government are casting about for help in
ridding the city of the deadly Slake Moths, they timidly summon the
Ambassador from Hell, who, it turns out, is too scared of these
monsters to offer assistance. This is a good joke, but once again it’s
a set-piece not strictly relevant to the plot – which, once the major
threat is established, turns into a bug-hunt, albeit one with
unexpected twists. At the end, little has changed – a difference from
The Lord of the Rings, actually.

Miéville has set further novels
in the world of Bas-Lag. The danger with this, I fear, is that the
shock of this fictional world is liable to diminish the more it is
described. With important elements left to the reader’s imagination –
is it an alien planet, a parallel world or a scenario of the far
future? – it is scary precisely because, as in a nightmare, anything
may be possible. As more is described, the possibilities are one by one
closed off.

Also, as further novels are added to the series it
becomes more and more just another fantasy franchise – and so, however
much he may defend genre, it may be that Miéville’s wish for his
writing to be considered more “seriously” has compelled him to set his
current novel, The City and the City in a more realistic, contemporary
fictional world – albeit one with a metaphysical dimension. So when I
return to this author, this is the book I shall investigate next, to
see whether he is closer to his “Holy Grail” of combining fantasy
writing with serious literary groundbreaking.